There are times in life where it’s really easy to see that something isn’t working. Take Christmas lights as an example. They are either on, off, or blinking. If they’re off and you flip the switch and they don’t turn on…something is wrong. In my case, it’s usually a missing bulb, but it could be a broken bulb, a crimped wire, or even a burned-out bulb. There are certain diagnostic steps that you take to resolve the problem. In my wife’s case you cheerfully smile and throw the entire string away, reveling in the fact that you’ve finally gotten rid of another of the darn strings of lights. I mean, who really needs 100+ strings?

In my case, I systematically go through the string, testing each bulb…pulling, replacing, pulling, replacing…until I find the culprit. The vast majority of the time, the problem is solved right then and there.

This past Christmas, as we were hanging our lights, any strings that weren’t working were set aside to be addressed later. It was part of our Doing Things Right campaign of 2016. We’re trying to keep from putting things off without a plan. Rather, we’re postponing certain projects until the time is available, but we’re also recording those tasks somewhere so we don’t forget.

So a couple weeks ago I sat down to attack the Christmas lights. The idea was to make final assessments on whether each string could be repaired or whether it should be trashed. This met another goal for 2016, to Lighten. Not as in shine light on things, but to remove clutter from our lives. If the string of Christmas lights isn’t working in January, there’s very little chance that it will heal itself by next December. Better to either fix it now or get rid of it than have it cluttering up our lives and stressing us out each successive year. Eventually we’ll only have 100% tested and working strings of lights. It might be 2016, it might be 2017, but it’s within the foreseeable future if we stick to the plan.

And that’s what had me sitting on the floor with a pile of bulbs, a stack of non-working strings of lights, the lightbulb tester, and what I hoped was a huge helping of patience. The first few strings went smoothly. A missing bulb here, a broken bulb there. One replacement and voilà, the string of lights was working. Those got placed into ziploc bags, marked as working, and dated (so we know the last time the lights were tested). Then they were placed into a box to go into storage.

A few light strings took a bit longer. Some had a combination of bad bulbs. One had a blown fuse. A couple had frayed wires. I repaired the strings as I could, but a few found their way to the trash bin. While I hate throwing things out that might be able to be salvaged, it was for the greater good, so I threw them away.

But there was one more category of strings of lights that really threw me. They weren’t broken in the traditional sense…they lit. The only problem was, they were blinking. Don’t get me wrong, I love blinking lights. Every year I decorate the trees (we have two). One get all white lights. Little tiny sparkly lights. Something akin to miniature stars. My wife loves this tree. It’s what Christmas is for her. The other tree gets multicolored lights. But not just multicolored lights, lights that blink. We even have strings that can be programmed to have different blinking patterns. In a good year I get all the strings to blink differently making the tree a veritable cacophony of flashing and blinking. This is what Christmas is for me. Glorious chaos.

And every year my wife nixes the blinking tree and makes me turn them to solid on. One year she graciously allowed me to have the lights slowly fade on and off, but all the strings had to be in the same pattern. That took a bit of work. At least the tree looked like a living representation of Christmas to me. But most years we have statically lit trees, stoic reminders to my wife’s childhood and nothing akin to my own.

But I digress. If you remember, I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by strings of lights that were mysteriously blinking. Some fast, some slow, and some were only blinking every second or third light. But they were blinking. They wouldn’t be allowed on the trees, so they had to be neutered. And this is where I started to slowly go crazy. I couldn’t figure out why they were blinking. None of these strings had controllers on them. I couldn’t find any of the clear but red-tipped blinker lights. There was no visible evidence as to why they were blinking…but they were. At one point I had all seven strings plugged in, strung across the floor. Not only were they blinking, they were blinking in different patterns. In a way it was very comforting to me…but it was a complete disaster to my wife. She wanted them solid-colored or in the trash. There was no middle ground.

I methodically removed and replaced each bulb in string one. Still blinking. I tried string two. Same result. String three and four were the same. Then I tried replacing all the bulbs in string five and it worked. Well, the glorious slow blink of Happy Christmas had been killed and replaced by the somber stillness of solid lights. I eventually figured out that each string had TWO blinker lights, and it only took one to turn the string into a blinking string. So now all seven strings have been tagged and bagged, readied for a somber year as solid colored lights.

Those Christmas tree lights are kind of a metaphor for life. Sometimes things are going well. Everything is smooth sailing, not worries, all happy-happy. Sometimes things aren’t going well, they’re utter crap. A disaster around every corner and nothing you do seems to really fix it.

But then there are those other times when things aren’t exactly broken, but it’s not right. The lights are on but they’re blinking. Good, not so good, good, not so good. And they’re not supposed to blink, they’re supposed to be steady…everything is supposed to be good. Those are the times that are the most challenging, because you know that fixing the problem is going to take time, but it’s not such a big problem that it must be fixed. It ought to be fixed, but it doesn’t have to be fixed.

That’s the biggest challenge in life…knowing when to fix things and when to let them ride.

At least that’s how I see it.